For those who do not know WPA I will shortly describe what it means. WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access and is a certification program to make wireless computer networks more secure. WPA follows the program WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) which was developed in the 1990s and had the same target but several weaknesses and that for soon after the development hackers broke its encryption key. But as mentioned also WPA is under threat. As I have read in an article two security researchers have developed a way to crack WPA. They have cracked the encryption key by discovering a way to trick a WPA router into sending them large amounts of data which makes cracking the key easier.

However there is already a new version called WPA2 which should be resistant against this danger but we will see for how long.

WPA2 is an interoperability testing certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance that was developed after approval of the first WPA specification. It is based on the Robust Security Network (RSN) mechanism, which provided support for all of the mechanisms available in WPA and more. Features included strong encryption and authentication support for both infrastructure and ad-hoc networks, whilst WPA was only limited to infrastructure networks. WPA2 also provides a reduced overhead in key derivation whilst exchanging information through a wireless LAN, and reducing overhead between access points while roaming. WPA2 replaced WPA’s protocol, TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol), with CCMP (Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol). WPA2 certification became mandatory, by 2006, for all new equipment by Wi-Fi Alliance ensuring all modern hardware support both WPA and WPA2.